A Representation of B2B Interacting Actions

In the era of Internet-based services, companies increasingly use Web technologies to interact. To automate electronic exchanges between businesses, the classical approach it to define beforehand a common interacting protocol that must be strictly followed at runtime. This imposes a costly design time and a constrained runtime. Our goal is to propose an intermediary multi-agent platform that allows partners directly engaging in business-to-business (B2B) exchanges without needing to ensure their respective information systems (IS) interoperability. To reach this goal, autonomous agents must be able to understand the meaning of all exchanged business messages as well as to interpret on-the fly their potential impact on the overall business transaction. Thus in this paper we propose a commitment-based representation which defines the sending of business messages by actions with preconditions and effects according to the enterprises' IS. This representation allows monitoring B2B interactions in term of both choreographies requirements and business commitments.